Shock Jocks and Free Speech

"When Howard Stern is the nation's leading defender of the First Amendment, you know something has gone horribly wrong." That's what Brian Chin says about the FCC's indecency rules in arguing that the agency has outlived his usefulness. Buzzworthy: Fadeout for FCC? [seattlepi.com].

Well, he's right and he's wrong. What is horribly wrong is that the FCC's indecency campaign is a transparently political effort to legislate morality on a steadily declining segment -- broadcasting -- of the media market. Hence Stern's move to the satellite-radio provider Sirius to escape government censorhip. But what is perfectly right is that it has always been folks like Stern -- and Lenny Bruce and many others before him -- who pushed the envelope of political speech.

Civil liberties in America exist to protect everyone, but it is only a few bold people among us, sometimes vulgar, who actually have the nerve to test the limits of the First Amendment. America has relied on the Howard Sterns of this world for more than two centuries to maintain the principles of free speech. Like him or not, his battle with the FCC is a classic paradigm of civil liberties. Nothing wrong with that at all. It's precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

 Posted by glenn